By Larry Hardy
Canadians heard quite a bit from Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s 2018 Budget that had few surprises from a government that panders to specific groups, but none is more telling than the Trudeau government’s pandering to the definite article lobby. Afterall, ‘the’ is mentioned a whopping 6,490 times.
I don’t like my taxes going to a word that has little meaning unless there’s a word after it. ‘The’ is so dependent on others, and now the government is going to spend even more money on it. No wonder we have a deficit that keeps spiraling out of control.
And then there’s ‘and,’ which is mentioned 4,959 times. Isn’t it about time that we stop investing in this function word which we see over and over and over? Meanwhile, our hyphenated compounds like ‘free-for-all’ have been left of out the budget.
There are so many others who have been excluded from Budget 2018 thanks to Trudeau’s fawning over special interest pronouns like ‘it,’ which received 501 mentions. What about white, middle-aged, hardworking adverbs like ‘heartily?’ Or an ellipsis to mark a moment of silence for all those fallen letters who were gave up their lives in a contraction? We saw none of this because our government doesn’t care about these important words.
Here are the number times that these terms were put in the budget:
‘Defenestration’: 0
‘Tusk’: 0
‘Endangered cougar in heat’: 0
In my Canada, all words are equal, but Justin Trudeau doesn’t seem to think so.
